Friday, September 10, 2010

A Bump in the Road

   I was originally going to write today about my own personal (albeit brief) experience with the pump, and I still will, but a strange thing happened on the way to the blog.

   First off, Jonathan is loving the pump (aside from set changes).  He loves the fact that he can have a meal and not see a needle.  And although the novelty will surely wear off at some point, he thinks his new pump is the bomb.  He's so far, knock on wood, been really good about not playing with it as well as reminding any of it's users to lock the keypad before putting it away.  Sleeping with it has not seemed to be an issue so far with one previously unforeseen problem.

   When Jonathan's numbers are high, we are pretty much assured a wet pull-up, and sometimes a "breech of containment".  This happened Wednesday night (wee hours of Thursday morning).  It's happened before and was not a shock at the time.  We did have to deal with a wet pump case, but it washed nicely in the sink and was dry by morning*.

   We changed the set yesterday, just before dinner, and with a few tears and a couple yells, it was over rather quickly**.  We all ate, I went to a JDRF meeting, Bobbie stayed home and watched carefully as his numbers dipped as low as 4.2 (76), but come back up on their own to be about 8 (144) in a straight line through the night.  I was ecstatic, what great numbers, thank you pump.  We tested him at 7am for breakfast and got a 4.1, but it was just as he was about to eat and the pump would reduce.  When I lifted hi pajama top to get the pump for the bolus, I saw the previous site we removed last night (it's a little hard to tell from the puctures, but it looks like he's going to give birth to a golf ball).


   Luckily, we already had a doctors appointment for Alexandra this morning so the doctor saw them both at the same time.  Definitely infected - pain, swollen, slight fever - antibiotics.

   Jonathan was quite upset this morning when he had to sit at the table and eat breakfast, in hindsight the night belt was probably putting pressure on it (dumb daddy), but he insisted on going to school and I allowed it since I was already planning on being there every couple hours again today to finish off the first week of pump.

   Hopefully the antibiotics kick in quick and this passes.

   A couple of things that came to mind as I was writing this post:

* - If it wasn't the urine, I have to wonder if it was the belt itself over the old site all night.  The body side of the belt is the soft loop side of "velcro", so now I can't help but wonder of some loose fibers worked their way in as the belt rubbed against him last night.

** - I didn't dress the wound from the site (I did wipe it with an alcohol wipe and put pollysporin on it).  This was his third set that had been inserted and the previous two only left a mosquito-bite like mark that faded after a couple of days.  This was however the first one that had insulin going through it.  I doubt that could he the issue (it better not be).  Regardless, I think I will be having to invest in some button bandages just to be on the safe side.


   I was psyching myself up the whole time for a kinked cannula, set pulled out, even the dreaded A33 (aka "a word I don't ever want to use in this blog" code), but this came straight out of left field.

   Despite the discomfort and the freaky looking bump, Jonathan still says he wants to keep his pump and not go back to shots.  Barring issue, his next set change is Sunday evening and he coincidentally has a follow up appointment for this issue Monday morning at 9am, so, God forbid, the next former site pulls this s#!t, he already has an in with the Doc.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Marc, sorry to hear about Jonathan's infected site. As much as the pump is an awesome tool to treat D it is still very far from a cure... When we started pumping 6.5 yrs ago, we first ran into lipoatrophy which was fixed by changing types of insulin. We've had 1 infection caused by Adele scratching an old site with "dirty" fingernails. Not fun at all... Hang in there, I find that it takes a while for a person's skin to adapt to the infusion set (if that even makes sense?). A few things that help us are using an ice pack to help with the itching and skin irritation as soon as Adele takes out an old set. We also use vitamin E oil on the skin afterwards to help heal faster and homeopathic skin cream a few days later which seems to help. How long are you keeping a set in? We find that if we go over 3 days the risk of infection is so much greater, sometimes after 2 days if we notice lots of redness we'll change it.

    Hope this helps... Hang in there, it will all be worth it in the end.

    Mike

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  2. Yikes, I hope it doesn't hurt. Sorry he had to go through that :(

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  3. :( . We have had one somewhat infected site in over 3 1/2 years of pumping...didn't need antibiotics though. Jonathan's looks way worse than Joe's did. We definitely did not have that type of swelling. I hope this round goes better.

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  4. YOWSER! We haven't had the pleasure yet.

    It sounds like you have a great plan for prevention in the future.

    Keep up the good work and keep us posted!

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  5. I hope that's just one-time thing, and he's doing better now!

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  6. OUCH!!! That bump looks painful, poor little guy. Hope you have better luck with the next site change on Sunday!

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